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Lip-plates and the people who take photographs

Uneasy encounters between Mursi and tourists in southern Ethiopia. By David Turton, published in Anthropology Today Vol 20 No 2, April 2004.

The takeover of Ethiopia’s Omo National Park by African Parks Foundation (APF) of the Netherlands

African Parks Foundation (APF) a Netherlands-based organization with strong South African links, is about to sign a public-private partnership deal whereby it will take over management of the Omo National Park, in the Southern Regional State of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. It was originally intended that this agreement would include the nearby Mago National Park. APF has now decided to exclude the Mago Park from the agreement, although it has not ruled out the possibility that it may offer to extend its management to the Mago at a later date. APF has been managing another Ethiopian national park, Nech Sar (also in the Southern Regional State), since February 2005, having signed an agreement with the Ethiopian government in February 2004.

African Parks Foundation And The Omo National Park

By David Turton, prepared for a meeting of African Parks Foundation and the IUCN National Committee for the Netherlands, which was due to take place on 17 May, 2006, under the chairmanship of Paul Wolvekamp of Both Ends. The notes set out key matters of concern in the recent takeover of the Omo National Park by African Parks Foundation (APF) of the Netherlands.

African Parks Foundation (APF) Omo Agreement

Agreement signed between the Ethiopian government and African Parks Foundation (APF) in November 2005 for the management of the Omo National Park. APF took over control of the Park in January 2006, with a 25 year lease.

Looking for a cool place: the Mursi, 1890s-1980s

 

Exploration in The Lower Omo Valley of Southwestern Ethiopia Between 1890 and 1910

Until very recently our knowledge of the peoples of the lower Omo was almost entirely derived from the reports of a dozen or so travellers, explorers and military adventurers, of various nationalities, who visited the area in rapid succession between approximately 1890 and 1910. The information they provided about local populations was fragmentary and, when considered as a whole, highly confusing. One traveller would report that he had found a certain group living in a flourishing condition in a place where another, passing through a few years later, could find little or no trace of human occupation. Different travellers, furthermore, would frequently use different names to refer to the same group, with the result that the ethnographic maps of the area soon became littered with a confusing variety of ethnic labels. One reason for all this was that these early visitors were not especially interested in the peoples they met, except in so far as they helped or hindered their main objectives which lay in geographical discovery, military campaigning, big game hunting, the triangulation of international borders or, most often, a combination of these. What facts they recorded about local languages and cultures were, for them, a relatively unimportant by-product of these other activities.

Latin based Mursi orthography

Moges Yigezu and David Turton, ‘Latin based Mursi orthography’, ELRC Working Papers, Ethiopian Languages Research Center, Addis Ababa University, Vol. 1, No. 2 December 2005, pp. 242-57.

The Mursi and the elephant question

The call for 'community participation' in conservation projects has grown to such an extent over the past few years that it has virtually become current orthodoxy, along with similar calls for participation and 'bottom‑up' planning and management in rural development projects (IIED, 1994; Pimbert and Pretty, 1995; and numerous references therein). The reasons for this turning away from a 'preservationist' approach, which sees local people as an obstacle to effective natural resource management, are as much biological and economic as they are moral and political. Firstly, since virtually all existing eco‑systems are a function of human use and disturbance, artificially to exclude such disturbance runs the risk of reducing biodiversity rather than preserving it (Hobbs and Huenneke, 1992, p. 324, cited by Pimbert and Pretty, 1995, p. 21). Secondly, not only are the technical and logistical costs of attempting to exclude human activity from protected areas very high but such efforts are almost certain to fail. They will alienate the local population from conservation objectives and thus require an ever‑increasing and, in the long‑run, unsustainable level of investment in policing activities.

Mursi Response to Drought: Some Lessons for Relief and Rehabilitation

David Turton, ‘Mursi Response to Drought: Some Lessons for Relief and Rehabilitation’. African Affairs 84,1985, pp. 331-46

Making 'The Mursi'

An account by Leslie Woodehead of his experience of making 'The Mursi' in 1974.

Le Mun (Mursi)

David Turton, ‘Le Mun (Mursi)’, in J. Perrot (ed.) Les langues dans le Monde ancien et moderne: Les langues de l'Afrique subsaharienne, pidgins et creoles. CNRS, Paris, 1981, pp. 335-349. A linguistic summary of the Mursi Language (tugo).

The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia: Mursi

David Turton and M.L. Bender, ‘Mursi’, in M.L. Bender (ed.) The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia. African Studies Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 1976, pp. 533-61.

The meaning of place in a world of movement: lessons from long-term field research in Southern Ethiopia

 

Omo National Park, Ethiopia

Letter from Survival International to African Parks Foundation, 31 October 2007.

A Journey Made Them: Territorial Segmentation and Ethnic Identity among the Mursi

David Turton, 'A journey made them: territorial segmentation and ethnic identity among the Mursi', in Ladislav Holy (ed.) Segmentary lineage systems reconsidered, Department of Social Anthropology, Queen's University Papers in Social Anthropology, Volume 4, Queen's University, Belfast, 1979, pp. 119-43.